Woman, 29, has rare condition and can only have tea and biscuits

Woman, 29, has rare condition and can only have tea and biscuits Leah Smith started to get severely bloated every time she ate A young woman with a rare condition can only consume tea and biscuits. Whenever Leah Smith, 29, would eat it ended in severe bloating and swelling, which made her look pregnant. She said she would be "violently sick" and would vomit undigested food that was still in her stomach days later, leading her at her worst to lose 6st in 10 weeks. Leah suffered for a year before being diagnosed with gastroparesis (stomach paralysis) - meaning the nerves which told her stomach to empty became paralysed, leaving her unable to move food into her intestines. Her case is so severe that she has since had a Hickman line connected to her chest, which the feed is then connected to. She has to wear it for 12 hours a day, five days a week. Leah was forced to medically retire as an NHS A&E receptionist and has been told that the only things she can now stomach are tea and biscuits. She has also said how she can no longer remember the taste of food, but still "loves" to cook. Leah, from Benfleet, Essex, said: "The only things I can really manage are tea, coffee with lactose-free milk and occasionally the cream from the middle of a custard cream biscuit. To me it isn't strange not eating anymore, as I know the complications that come with it - but in fact I actually enjoy cooking. "I don’t actually miss eating my favourite foods as I’ve actually lost the memory of the flavour of them. My life now revolves around my TPN connection and disconnection times. "I was put on the machine because doctors told me that I was starving to death. I would say it affected my life at the beginning, as friends didn’t really know what I would be comfortable with. But I still go out to family meals, just because I don’t eat doesn’t mean I can't get the socialisation from it." Leah said she has had digestive problems since being a teenager. But they progressively got worse until around June 2023, she suddenly found herself unable to eat. She said: "I realised my stomach seemed to hold onto food for about three days before I'd be violently sick. My digestive system just wasn't moving food through properly." Leah then also began losing weight rapidly, so she visited her GP in early July 2023. She had her bloods tested and underwent an endoscopy, CT scan, capsule camera and ultrasound, but doctors struggled to identify the cause of her symptoms. Leah said he also tried changing her diet to relieve pain. She said: "Weirdly, the only thing I could tolerate for a while was ready salted Pringles. I basically lived off them for months." Due to her deteriorating health Leah was repeatedly admitted to hospital with severe malnutrition and starvation ketosis. She said: "I lost around 6st in about 10 weeks, but because I was still technically within a healthy BMI range, I often felt like people didn't understand how seriously ill I was." She also claims she was told her symptoms were "psychological or linked to my autism", which she says has left her sometimes to struggle to "trust herself and symptoms". Leah underwent a series of increasingly complex nutritional interventions as doctors searched for answers. Initially she was fed through a nasogastric (NG) tube, which passes through the nose into the stomach, before later receiving a nasojejunal (NJ) tube, which feeds directly into the small bowel. But a breakthrough finally came when Leah paid to see a private gastroenterologist in August 2023. She said: "He immediately suspected gastroparesis linked to my Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and arranged a gastric emptying study." Gastroparesis, meaning “stomach paralysis,” occurs when the nerves that control stomach emptying fail to function properly, causing food to move too slowly through the digestive tract. It affects just 14 in every 100,000 people in the UK, according to Guts UK, the national charity for the digestive system. A gastric-emptying study confirmed that Leah's stomach was barely emptying at all. She said: "After three-and-a-half hours, I still had full stomach contents sitting there undigested when it should have emptied much earlier." Leah was then referred to a specialist intestinal failure team. She was then admitted to hospital in November 2024 to start Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN). A method of delivering complete nutrition directly into a person's bloodstream and in her case through a Hickman line. This now means she is fed daily directly into her bloodstream through a tube which leads into her chest by a machine called a Micrel pump, which she carries in a blackout rucksack. There is no cure for gastroparesis, according to Guts UK. Experts at Guts UK say Leah’s experience of TPN feeding is extremely rare due to high risks of complications, including infection. Now two years on, Leah says living with gastroparesis continues to affect every aspect of her life. She said: "Simple things like hoovering, walking my dog or going out with friends completely wipe me out. I wish people understood how serious and life-changing digestive conditions can be.” According to a YouGov poll, commissioned by the charity Guts UK, 28% of adults who have experienced digestive symptoms have felt embarrassed by them.